Beach walk

Saturday night we arrived at the Youth Hostel and met up with the rest of the group. It was dark and we got a fair amount of snow in Berlin on Friday, and Usedom did too. The 4 kids made this snowman on Saturday after dinner. It was cold out, but they were all rugged up.

Being the first snow of the season...the snowmen tend to be really filthy with all the autumn leaves catching into the snow as you roll the balls along the ground...but the kids didn't care.
The Youth Hostel we stayed at was really quiet...They took our booking as there were quite a few of us, and then they closed the next day until after Xmas. It was a magnificent Youth Hostel....
This was our "house", the rooms were really large, and we had a large sitting room to spend the evening drinking wine and beer. The kids had a separate lounge room, which pleased both them and the adults.

After breakfast we all put on our warm clothes and set out for a beach walk. It was about 2 degrees as we walked along the beach.....but it was really lovely. There were heaps of other people out doing exactly the same thing. Can you believe it...snow on the beach! How fantastic!!

Below is Kirstin and Cameron looking for shells

Duncan got a new gadget and we tried to do some Geo Caching. He had the coordinates to 2 treasures near where we were staying, from the Geo Cache Website. (click on this website and type in your postcode.....it's amazing what is hidden not far from your house!) It was fun trying to look for them.

Alexander had the tracker to begin with, and he counted down the metres and walked in the direction of the arrow.

The first Geo Cache was on this pier, right on the front right corner. We looked everywhere for a little box or film cannister that was our treasure. Anne thought she could see something sitting on the beam underneath the pier.

So Phil lay down on the pier, with his arm underneath trying to get hold of the box....while Anne and Sonia yelled out directions for him to get hold of the box....his arm just wasn't long enough.

While this was all happening, we were all laughing, and the looks from other people walking past us made us laugh even more! Phil couldn't reach the box that the girls were directing him to - It was a good thing, because lying on a wet pier with your hand in an electrical junction box would not be recommended by Hector the Safety Cat!

So Duncan decided to take off his shoes and socks and try and reach it from the beach. Remember it was 2 degrees....it was one way for him to get over his jet lag quickly anyway! (He had been in America for the week) Note...this caused the locals to give us even stranger looks.

Duncan still couldn't reach up onto the beams from under the pier, so he grabbed Cameron and hauled him onto his shoulders for extra height, which then made the locals stop to look at what the "Auslanders" were doing under this pier.

The black box was holding some cables, and was part of the pier...not what we were looking for at all. Perhaps the Cache had already been taken....or it was taken by "Muggles" who do not know what a Geo Cache is?? I guess in this era, a small box taped to something would cause all sorts of questions to those not in the loop.
The only other thing we could think of was perhaps it was buried near the pole, but the tide wasn't out far enough, and it was too cold to be digging in the sand. After a couple of minutes Duncan's feet were frozen, so we gave up on that Cache, and went in search of some Milch Kaffee , Hot Chocolates and Cappachino's.
The second Geo Cache we tracked down we managed to get to as close to 2 metres from it, but it was in the Thermal Baths gardens, which was closed. We would have probably climbed over the fence, except for the thorny branches in the garden! So, not a successful game, but we had fun trying! You can do this with any GPS locator, and it might be a fun thing to do when out for a walk anywhere in the world!
Some of the houses and hotels along the path behind the beach were just fabulous! No wonder this is a popular tourist spot in Summer. I can just imagine all of the towels covering the beach at 7:00 am in August (and probably lots of naked bodies too)!

We had lots of fun this weekend, and the kids did too! Lots of snowballs being thrown, trees to climb, running around, fossicking on the beach. Here are three boys (BJ, Alexander and Cameron) up a tree, and probably up to no good....
We had a great run back to Berlin after a late lunch. A very successful weekend away, and we look forward to the next one, sometime after Christmas.